He kissed me. A kiss about apple pie a la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate, when you haven't eaten chocolate in a year. A kiss about palm trees speeding by, trailing pink clouds when you drive down the Strip sizzling with champagne. A kiss about spotlights fanning the sky and the swollen sea spilling like tears all over your legs.

I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken -- and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.

I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught in some moorings. I am always tying up and then deciding to depart. In storms and at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide around my fathomless arms, I am unable to understand the forms of my vanity or I am hard with my Polish rudder in my hand and the sun sinking. To you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage of my will. The terrible channels where the wind drives me against the brown lips of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet I trust the sanity of my vessel; and if it sinks, it may well be in answer to the reasoning of the eternal voices, the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

All I do is act on my passions and they call it sin. All I do is tell the truth and they call me a hypocrite. All feel is pain and sorrow and they call it love. All I do is pour my heart out to empty pages and they call it poetry.

It’s cold in the room, Mommy. It’s cold and all I have to wear is a yucky-green smock that matches the yucky-green walls. All the walls are cold, the metal table is cold, and the doctor’s fingers are cold as they hold my hand and tell me not to worry. But I’m worried, mommy. The doctors say that I might not wake up…they’re saying that I have a ninety percent chance of dieing, and I’m scared: I don’t want to go away, mommy; I don’t want to leave you behind. There’s a big clock on the wall, and it says it’s 3:15 in the afternoon. Ms. Loughlin just let class out for the day…Billy and Jeff are probably wrestling just outside the classroom, waiting for their daddies to pick them up so they can go home and eat dinner and do their homework and sleep. I wish I was there, mommy…I wish I was anywhere but here. I’m crying, mommy. I promised you I wouldn’t, but I’m crying and I can’t stop. The doctors are going to give me the medicine now to make me sleep so I don’t feel anything, so you won’t have to worry about me hurting anymore. But mommy, they said they had to take Teddy from me…they had to give him to you…mommy, please, hold him, hold him, and promise me, mommy, promise me if I don’t wake up you’ll keep him for me: he’s going to miss me a lot, and he’ll need someone to hug. And mommy… Goodbye, mommy.

And then as it seems with a blink of an eye, My negative thoughts drift on by. It's taken but a moment to change a month of misery. And in that moment I remain, Inside myself the relief of pain. As the moment fades, my thoughts begin to quiver. A moment in time cannot live forever.